THE EDUCATION OF E.F. SCHUMACHER

"It's all very well to live simply and grow things and practice crafts... but what about the hundreds of thousands who can't hope to be self-sufficient in property and craft?" This summarizes the complaint by modern critics against "distributism"—the economic philosophy inspired by Catholic social teaching and developed, early last century, by Catholic thinkers such as G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc. According to distributism, property should be spread widely, so that people can earn a living without having to rely on the state (socialism) or a small number of individuals (capitalism). According to the pessimistic view of critics, small-scale economies are fine in principle, but are no longer practical.

Such questions were central to the philosophical grappling of Dr. E.F Schumacher, who came to the conclusion that pessimism was self-fulfullingly prophetic. If one believes the worst one will probably get the worst. Negation begets negation. The antidote to such despair, Dr. E.F. Schumacher believed, was hope. It was in this spirit that he wrote Small is Beautiful in 1973, a book which, for a time at least, made distributism the most fashionable economic and political creed in the world. Schumacher's trained economic mind had resolved many of distributism's alleged problems so that its principles became applicable even to 'the hundreds of thousands who can't hope to be self-sufficient in property or craft.' Schumacher had succeeded where Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton had failed.

Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, subtitled 'a study of economics as if people mattered', was published in 1973 to immediate acclaim and became an international best-seller. At the time of its publication Schumacher was already well known as an economist, journalist and entrepreneur. He was Economic Adviser to the National Coal Board from 1950 to 1970, and was also the originator of the concept of Intermediate Technology for developing countries. In 1967 he became a trustee of the Scott Bader Commonwealth, a producers' co-operative established in 1959 when the company's owner, Ernest Bader, transferred ownership to his workforce. Bader, a Quaker, believed that establishing co-operative ownership was an expression of Christian social principles in practice. To the surprise of many sceptics, the Scott Bader Commonwealth prospered, becoming a pathfinder in polymer technology and a model of good labour relations at a time of considerable labour unrest throughout the rest of industry. Schumacher also served as President of the Soil Association, Britain's largest organic farming organization.

Born in Bonn on 16 August 1911, Schumacher first came to England in October 1930 as a Rhodes Scholar to study economics at New College, Oxford, where he stayed until September 1932. At the age of twenty-two he went to New York to teach economics at Columbia University. Finding theory without practical experience unsatisfying, he returned to Germany and tried his hand at business, farming and journalism. In 1937, utterly appalled with life in Hitler's 'Third Reich, he made his final move to England. During the way he returned to the academic life at Oxford and devised a plan for economic reconstruction which influenced John Maynard Keynes in the latter's leading part in the formulation of the Bretton Woods agreement. After the war Schumacher became Economic Adviser to the British Control Commission in Germany from 1946 to 1950, before becoming Economic Adviser to the National Coal Board, a post he held for the next twenty years.

It was clear that Schumacher's credentials as an economist were beyond question, but few realized when Small is Beautiful was published that his economic theories were underpinned by solid religious and philosophical foundations, the fruits of a lifetime of searching. In 1971, two years before the publication of Small is Beautiful, Schumacher had become a Roman Catholic, the final destination of his philosophical journey.

The journey began shortly after the war with a growing disillusionment with Marxist economic theory...

"Modern economists, Schumacher wrote, 'normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions.' This was not the case: 'economics is a "derived" science which accepts instructions from what I call meta-economics. As the instructions are changed, so changes the contents of economics.'
"To illustrate the point, in a chapter entitled 'Buddhist Economics' Schumacher explored the ways in which economic laws and definitions of concepts such as 'economic' and 'uneconomic' change 'when the meta-economic basis of western materialism is abandoned and the teaching of Buddhism is put in its place'. He stipulated that the choice of Buddhism 'is purely incidental; the teachings of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism could have been used just as well as those of any other of the great Eastern traditions'.
"Taking the concept of 'labour' or work as an example, he compared the attitude of Western economists to their Buddhist counterparts. Economists in the 'west' considered labour 'as little more than a necessary evil':
"From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a 'disutility'; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.
"'From a Buddhist point of view,' Schumacher explained, 'this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, a surrender to the forces of evil.'
"The Buddhist view, on the other hand, 'takes the function of work to be at least threefold': 'to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.'
"From the Buddhist standpoint, Schumacher continued, 'to organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.'
"For Schumacher there were three main culprits: Freud, Marx and Einstein. In England, this view had been advocated already by Chesterton, Belloc, Gill and the other distributists, and also by Dorothy L. Sayers. Yet Schumacher appeared to be unaware of their writings at the time he visited Burma in the early fifties. His introduction to the religious basis of economics was, therefore, a Buddhist not a Christian revelation. Most importantly, however, he had discovered that economics was a derivative of philosophical or religious premises and this led to fundamental changes in outlook. Not only did he begin to see economics in a radically different light, he began to see the crucial importance of philosophy to an understanding both of economics in particular and of life in general."

An old essay -- but a very important one. In the 20th Century we witnessed the futility and cruelty of one form of atheistic, materialist economics (socialism); now, we are beginning to see the equal pointlessness and inhumanity of atheistic, materialist capitalism. Both systems tend to reduce human beings to human resources; both are built upon the worship of a false god (maerialism) instead of the God of our fathers; both are led by a "vanguard" of materialist philosopher-kings; and both promote "a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence".

Capitalism and Communism are not enemies; they are twins, born of the humanistic "enlightenment" that brought untold misery to mankind in the form of revolution, redistribution, and the redefinition of Man. (For every benefit that has resulted from the destruction of traditional, integral Western civilization by materialist "enlightenment", three evils were created as well.) As conservatives, we must reject the false "light" of materialism and atheism and turn our thinking towards new ways -- or, rather, back to the old ways. We must leap beyond the gravitational pull of Left and Right, those evil twin stars of the liberal Revolution, and break through into the clear space of true conservatism, where Duty, Subsidiarity, and Community replace Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity as the watchwords of our society.

By pointing out the advantages (both moral and economic) of "economics as if people mattered", E.F. Schumacher gave us the philosophical launch pad we need to begin this quantum leap.

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